Benoit Doppagne/Belga/Sipa USA via AP Images
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, Petro Terblanche, managing director of Afrigen Biologics, and Belgian minister for development cooperation Meryame Kitir visit the Afrigen Formulation Facilities, February 11, 2022, in Cape Town, South Africa.
I received my first COVID-19 vaccination on February 9, 2022. As a molecular biochemist who had avidly observed the pandemic response from its earliest days, that felt acutely late. In the United States, over 75 percent of the population had received at least one dose—in fact, millions of doses had already been thrown away.
But I live in Zambia, where less than one-sixth of the population had received a dose. When I received my first jab, most of my neighbors, friends, and colleagues remained exposed to the deadly pandemic.
Contrary to popular perception, this is not due to African ineptitude in delivering public health. African countries excel at running efficient vaccination campaigns, since trial-and-error experience managing tropical diseases means that many governments have highly competent public-health systems. Unlike many of our Western counterparts, we were not stymied by mass mistrust of the medical establishment. We simply lacked the vaccines to administer.
Since Africa lacks our own vaccine manufacturing capability and couldn’t afford to compete with wealthy countries to purchase vaccines, we were forced to rely on the charity of the U.S., Europe, and other countries of the Global North, which doled out vaccines piecemeal, sometimes right before they expired.
Now, Western pharmaceutical companies are continuing to stonewall efforts to develop local vaccine production. And they are brazenly doing so right in the heart of the rich world.
Pharmaceutical companies, jealously guarding their research, are stalling international efforts to establish independent production capacity.
In April, the Biden administration announced the launch of Project NextGen, a $5 billion initiative to speed coronavirus vaccine research, which builds on the federal government’s staggering success with Operation Warp Speed. But because Moderna and Pfizer won’t play along and provide samples of their products, researchers at universities and smaller biotech companies are wasting months and millions of dollars recreating their research.
Pharmaceutical companies, jealously guarding their research, are stalling international efforts to establish independent production capacity, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Take Afrigen, a biotechnology company in Cape Town, South Africa. The small company of under 150 scientists is one of 15 firms in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) working to apply mRNA vaccine technology to COVID-19 and the myriad of other diseases, such as tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria, that cause much suffering on the continent. Afrigen is part of a broader effort to wean LMICs off their complete dependency on Western pharmaceutical giants.
Yet Afrigen is struggling to create more affordable, next-generation COVID-19 vaccines without the original mRNA vaccines to use as comparisons.
Pfizer and Moderna deserve enormous credit for their work developing lifesaving vaccines. But they did so with enormous support from the U.S. government, and now they are retarding the pace of further innovation.
A recent report by the medical advocacy nonprofit Prep4All shows one of the reasons the pharmaceutical industry refuses to provide research samples: They are afraid of competition. This is particularly egregious coming from Moderna, whose vaccine was the result of not only the company’s own innovation, but billions of dollars of federal funding through Operation Warp Speed.
Keeping vaccine development profitable is important, in order to ensure ingenuity in future crises. Pharmaceutical companies developed lifesaving vaccines in record time during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their creative incentives should be protected. But this motive should be balanced against the need for future innovation. Incumbents should not be able to impose sky-high costs on other researchers seeking to develop new immunization tools.
Moderna and Pfizer should share vials of authorized vaccine samples for further research. And there’s precedent for this. In 2019, Congress recognized the absurdity of allowing a company to withhold products just to frustrate others’ research and passed a law, the CREATES Act, that mandated the distribution of pharmaceutical samples for research under certain circumstances.
According to Prep4All, however, terms of the contract governing the United States government’s purchase of the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines still prevent it from freely disbursing its stockpile. Like the French government, it must gain the permission of the companies.
The U.S. is not helpless in the face of the contracts it inked, in the midst of a global emergency, with pharmaceutical giants. Washington has even more leverage than the French. Both Pfizer and Moderna are based in the U.S., and both have benefited immensely from taxpayer dollars. If the U.S. government is willing to play hardball about future purchases, Moderna and Pfizer will likely capitulate.
During the pandemic, the U.S. shared vaccines with low- and middle-income countries, helping us to immunize our populations. But so far, Washington has denied us support as we look to build domestic capacity to develop and manufacture vaccines. If the Biden administration is serious about building diplomatic goodwill in the developing world, it should amend the CREATES Act to make this possible.
Better yet, it could break the terms of the contract, distributing the vaccines to researchers and forcing Moderna and Pfizer to spell out in court why the size of their profit margins is more important than deaths due to infectious disease, today and in the future.
